


Mandatory Therapy

by ilegallydownloadedsock



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:34:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21569983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilegallydownloadedsock/pseuds/ilegallydownloadedsock
Summary: “You couldn’t pull off shorts,” says Hermione. “Your legs are too hairy. So don’t worry about it.” She leans forward, taking Harry’s empty plate in her right hand, and commences piling it high with breakfast foods. “If you don’t go to your mandatory therapy, Harry, “ she looks over at him significantly, “I will make you feel guilt.” She places his plate down in front of him with a thunk. “I will remind you of all the dead.” She lifts a fork and takes his arm, which is outstretched helplessly on the table, unclasping, with some effort, his hand which is clenched into a fist, and curls it back around the fork. “I will remind you that they would love to have survived the war.” She directs his fork-hand into a sausage, and she forces him to pierce it awkwardly. “They would have loved to go to mandatory therapy at 9.45 in the Astronomy Tower, which is in exactly half an hour, and don’t forget your trauma workbook.”
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

He and Hermione circle the Great Lake with her arm in the crook of his. Ron hangs back but doesn’t seem bothered about the intimacy between the two of them – when Harry casts his head back every so often, Ron is only concentrating on making sure his wandpoint stays illuminating Hermione’s footsteps, lighting her path. It is autumn – September – but the grounds by the lake are slippery with mud, and they’ve chosen the circuitous path back to the castle from Hogsmeade. Harry had drunk because Ron and Hermione had drunk. They had sat in a booth in the nicest corner of the Three Broomsticks and in the absence of the need for secrecy they had let Luna and Neville and Seamus and Dean and Parvati filter in and out of the conversation as well. Parvati and Dean had danced and so Hermione, trying something new, or something, had stood up herself and dragged Ron up onto his feet too, and Ron had held Hermione’s waist and they sashayed for a few minutes to The Ministry of Mad Gits before Hermione’s face turned red with embarrassment so they stopped. They were like his parents, Harry thought – brought together more quickly because of the pall of death that was hanging – had hung – over them. God, he got maudlin when he drank.

Hermione looks over at him and smiles and raises her eyebrows. He smiles back and pulls her arm in closer. _Ron,_ thinks Harry, _is growing, maturing, shedding his jealousy and proving himself to be a loving partner, because he’s not frozen the way that I am_ – _when you die and then come back what makes you different from the walking dead?_ It's a thought he's been having lately, which crops up at odd moments. Looking out at the lake, he remembers the Inferi. The texture of their clutching, weeping skin. That’s probably what put it in his head.

*

  
The next morning Harry wakes with a headache which he barely registers. At breakfast when he drops into his seat Hermione presses her wand to his temple, hmphs and rolls her eyes, casting something which takes the pain away instantly.

“Thanks,” he mumbles.

“Harry,” she says. It’s loud in the Great Hall but she’s louder. “You know that I’d come with you if I weren’t overloading with classes. I’ve read a great deal about th—”

He cuts her off with a finger to his lips which confirms that, yes, he may be insane.

“Don’t say it!”

“Oh, Harry,” she says. “It’s not just you who’ll be there, you know. Don’t tell me you’d rather be in History of Magic.”

“At least Binns never made us do – macramé,” says Harry. He’s trying to remember what sorts of things he spotted Oprah and her ilk doing on day-time telly at the Dursleys. “Trust falls. Turning trousers into a summer short.”

“You couldn’t pull off shorts,” says Hermione. “Your legs are too hairy. So don’t worry about it.” She leans forward, taking Harry’s empty plate in her right hand, and commences piling it high with breakfast foods. “If you don’t go to your mandatory therapy, Harry, “ she looks over at him significantly, “I will make you feel guilt.” She places his plate down in front of him with a thunk. “I will remind you of all the dead.” She lifts a fork and takes his arm, which is outstretched helplessly on the table, unclasping, with some effort, his hand which is clenched into a fist, and curls it back around the fork. “I will remind you that they would love to have survived the war.” She directs his fork-hand into a sausage, and she forces him to pierce it awkwardly. “They would have loved to go to mandatory therapy at 9.45 in the Astronomy Tower, which is in exactly half an hour, and don’t forget your trauma workbook.”

Harry lets out just one enormous sigh before the sausage enters the real estate of his mouth.

*

  
Malfoy is there too. In Mandatory Therapy. At the Astronomy Tower. At 9.45. Where they – that is, Harry and Malfoy – had failed to respectively save and kill Dumbledore. The thought makes him think, _Look, at least this isn’t Occlumency class_. He’s always being tossed into some remedial class or another. Sorry my parents weren’t _dentists,_ he thinks. They were _dead._ So of course I ended up with a shitty _brain_. It’s not fair to Hermione but there you have it – it’s something he thinks, on occasion. 

Inside the room – Trelawney’s old class room – there are nine chairs arranged in a circle. There are only nine traumatised people in the school? Harry thinks. Did the rest just die? The way he walks in he spots Malfoy from the back of his head. The little bastard would sit with his back to the door – showing off about how little trauma he has, thinks Harry. For his part, he heads towards a chair that will afford him a clear eyeline to the door, thank you very much.  
This will leave four chairs between Harry and Malfoy – a healthy distance. He drops into his, just as a wizard wearing a nametag which reads PSYCHOWIZARD emerges from behind a curtain behind which, Harry suspects, the PSYCHOWIZARD has stuffed all of Trelawney’s old things, to make way for the class. PSYCHOWIZARD. I’ll bet you are, thinks Harry.

Harry can’t discern if the two of them – the Psychowizard and Malfoy – have been occupying the room in silence waiting for a third to arrive, or if they’d been chatting right before he walked in. He can’t imagine Malfoy chatting lightly with anyone. Instead, Malfoy is just staring at his hands, palms up. He doesn’t look up when Harry opens the door and walks in, nor when he settles into his seat. Just stares at his palms – Harry catches the glint of three silver rings on his fingers. Bet he doesn’t bite his fingernails, thinks Harry. Showing off how little trauma he has. Arsehole.

  
Harry returns his attention to the approaching Psychowizard, who has been bee-lining toward Harry with an enormous grin on his face.

“Hey, Psychowizard,” says Harry. Malfoy’s head snaps up at that and he looks back down again but his eyebrows stay raised.

“It’s so, so nice to finally meet you. We had worried we would never meet you. My name is Bonython Buenamente.”

The Psychowizard holds out a hand and Harry takes it in his own and then for the hell of it pumps it firmly, double-clasping, deciding to put on a show of utmost sanity.

“Likewise,” says Harry. “So nice to meet you, Bonython. When you say we, though, what would you say you mean? Just because,” he jerks a thumb over at Malfoy, _“that_ guy has met me.”

He feels a little manic, like he’s on Felix Felicis. That’s one thing about being getting older, one thing he’s learnt out about himself recently – that he knows how to simulate charisma, how to be likeable and blokey and jovial and natural and easy and breezy, and it mostly sort of works. He had discovered this on the night of his eighteenth. Ron and Hermione had taken him out in Soho or somewhere equally horrible. He had worn a hoodie and jeans and sneakers and the bouncer almost hadn’t let him in because of the dress code. Instead of a Confundus Harry had just palmed the guy a ten pound note and smiled and leaned in and said, “Can I go in now, yeah?” and the guy had let him. It had felt like nothing at all. They had danced for hours and then a girl had stood too close to Harry, while Harry waited at the bar for drinks – it was his round – almost like she was – trying to touch Harry, waiting for some excuse to brush against him under the guise of moving past him. Frustrated, annoyed, feeling crowded and overly warm, Harry had turned around and said, “Hey,” and the girl had said, “Hey”, and within fifteen minutes they had been making out and that’d been that. It was easy to lean in close to shout in her ear, and then to reach out like it was natural and play with her hair, and then to keep his hand on her shoulder, and then to curl one round the back of her head, and then to get her to open up her lips, et cetera, et cetera. That, too, had felt like mostly nothing at all.

Bonython looks bewildered only for a moment but then laughs.

“Don’t bring an attitude into this space, Mr Potter.” He’s two heads shorter than Harry but Harry knows, senses, that he’s fucked up. “I won’t let you disrupt the therapeutic experience for the others.”

“What others?” says Harry, receding into his seat and resolved to wait out the clock with his hands behind his head out-nonchalanting Malfoy.

The door opens then, and like a clown car emptying, seven students stride briskly into the room clutching their trauma workbooks to their chests.


	2. 2

Of the seven Harry only recognises Luna and Dennis Creevey. It feels strange to contemplate both that most of his other friends and acquaintances have been deemed sane enough not to require treatment, and that there is a pool of students so touched by a war fought, effectively, over _him,_ that Harry didn’t even know about. Both of these are the reasons he has resisted coming to the group for the six weeks it has been running – he doesn’t want to suck all the oxygen out of the room, for being the most traumatised or the most responsible for other people’s trauma.

Luna descends into the seat next to Malfoy, who smiles close-mouthed and turns to hug her. Inside the quick embrace, with his head peeking over Luna’s shoulder, Harry can see that Malfoy’s expression is passive. The faker.

“Hi, Harry,” she says, as they settle into their seats together in twos or threes, murmuring to one another, and Bonython Buenamente disappears behind his curtain again. “You finally came.” 

Harry loves Luna but in this forum all he can manage is a shocked sort of slack-jawed shake of his head. He’s realised in the preceding six to twelve seconds that he’d rather die than participate in whatever format this group takes.

“Isn’t that your jailer?” says Harry loudly, instead, jerking his thumb at Malfoy. He’s committed to getting kicked out of the group, Hermione be damned. He knows Luna and Malfoy have been through this already, sat through sessions on accountability and something called Transformative Justice – much like Mandatory Therapy, all programs cooked up by McGonagall, with Hermione’s advisement and all based off a series of Muggle books she has read over the summer. Given the choice between Azkaban and this, Malfoy has chosen this. At first Harry had taken some small pleasure out of that idea – this seeming like a far greater torment, having to pretend like he saw his peers as equals. But now Harry is not so sure. 

_“Malfoy,” Luna had explained at the Three Broomsticks, just yesterday, smiling beatifically over her mug of Butterbeer, and hiccupping delicately, “has shared a great deal. He offered to leave the school for me and the other victims, you know? He wrote us each apologies. He’s let us ask him anything, any question, about why he did what he did. We’ve talked for ages. I think Xenophilius and Lucius really are very similar – we both have been very malleable when it comes to our fathers, you know? I know what it’s like to believe everything your father believes.” The war hadn’t changed Luna that much – hadn’t changed that Luna-sized kernel that made her her. And no, Harry didn’t know – he didn’t know if he was like his father or not._

“Harry!” says Luna, semi-scandalised and chastising, a tone she has never taken with him before. The other members of Mandatory Therapy have fallen silent and are watching.

“What you just said was really wrong, Mr Potter.” Fucking Bonython re-appears, holding an old Ottoman of Trelawney’s, one which used to intermittently emit squeaks and squeals from the corner of the dusty room during third year Divination. Harry seems to recall that any time an Aquarian sat on it it would spit out a solitary sea bass. Bonython places it in the centre of the room and sits down – no sea bass comes out. Not an Aquarius then. He has a stern expression on his face. “How did what Mr Potter said make you feel, Luna?”

“I felt that he had centered himself in my traumatic experience,” says Luna. The other members of the group, all eight of them, including Malfoy, nod slowly and thoughtfully.

“I—,” says Harry, but Malfoy cuts him off.

“If I may, Bonython?”

Bonython nods, swivelling his Ottoman to face Malfoy square on.

“I think I may be a trigger for Harry,” offers Malfoy. It’s the first sentence Harry has heard him speak since – last year. He still sounds bored, but gentler now, all polite hesitancy. “If you all remember, when we first started, I noted that was one of my fears?” The rest of the group nods as if they are under Imperio. _Nod thoughtfully every time anyone says anything!_ thinks Harry. “I will happily exclude myself from this group, if it means that Harry can engage in this space.”

Malfoy makes to stand up but Bonython puts up a hand.

“I appreciate your care,” says Bonython, swivelling now to face Harry. “But don’t speak for Mr. Potter. Let’s check in with him emotionally. Is it true that you won’t be able to engage in this space if Draco is here, Harry? Does he trigger you too much?”

Harry, for his part, feels that the wheels have come off the Knight Bus somewhat, that he has entered a world he doesn’t understand and one which has confounded him more than that first trip to Knockturn Alley when he was a literal twig-legged child.

“Um,” he says dumbly. “I reckon…” On its face it seems a tough choice: tell the truth, that he can’t help it, he just hates Malfoy, that he _can’t_ share space with Malfoy, and admit that he pushes Harry’s buttons like no one else, _and_ get Malfoy out of Mandatory Therapy to boot. Or, he could lie, and continue to share space with him. But it’s really no choice at all. He smiles. The arsehole wants a reason to leave and Harry won’t give him that satisfaction. “I reckon that if Draco is here with an open heart, then I too am willing to open my heart to him.”

Malfoy’s nostrils flare just a touch at that – Harry wonders if he is flashing back, at all, to the time he got Sectumsempra’d. That had been a little bit of an _open heart_ moment, hadn’t it? Blood gushing, et cetera.

But Malfoy schools his features and just says, “I feel that we could probably both share in good faith in this space, Harry. I feel that it is very big of you, even. I know that the animosity between us has often been intense. So – thank you.” He smiles, drawing his lips back to reveal his teeth which are straight in a sort of shark-like way, perfect and almost uncountable. Harry’s had been deemed _fine,_ once by an orthodontist when he was 10, and the Dursleys had left it at that. “I do feel that I need to say, though, that if I stimulate you too much you should just let me know and I can leave.” 

_Shut the fuck up, Malfoy,_ he doesn’t say. Semi-sarcastically he says, “I haven’t felt stimulated in five months.” Since the war ended. The worst thing is he secretly _does_ feel that way. Lately Harry has been thinking, _You could ram me with a wand-tip and shout Baubillious and I would barely feel anything._ Just out of the blue. He’ll be going about his day, walking down the stairs into the common room with a book under his arm, and he’ll think that. Staring at a portrait of a pear and he’ll think that.

“Well, okay! Let’s unpack that,” says Bonython, and everyone in the room nods thoughtfully.

*

It’s a lot of sitting still, in the end. The first half of the session proceeds in this talkative manner – they go about in a circle making horrific disclosure after horrific disclosure in a calm voice, never wavering from the _I feel_ format, just horrific disclosure after horrific disclosure and all of them pretending to stay calm over hearing them. Harry wonders when someone will break and just shout, _Isn’t this insane? What the fuck!_ But no one does so Harry also starts to nod thoughtfully.

Bonython mediates conflicts in the group – between the bereaved and those with what turns out to be called _survivor’s guilt_ , between the Slytherins and the Gryffindors. Harry lets out a thoughtful “Hmm”, entirely against his own will, when Dennis Creevey wonders aloud whether he is crazy to think that survival makes him – well, special. Isn’t he special? _Special but also a little bit cursed,_ thinks Harry. 

But in the second half of the session, the chairs are swished to the edges of the room, and foam mats flicked into their place, and everyone is made to sit or lie – Harry sits – and listen to their minds and monitor their bodies for an unbearable half an hour, while Bonython speaks in soothing tones and casts swirling constellations over the ceiling, and occasionally fills the room with the smell of lavender. Harry tries his best, he does, to Listen to his Body. To feel the size and shape of each one of his nostrils. To note that his fingertips are near Luna’s, and that he could reach out and touch hers if he wanted but he doesn’t want to disturb her because her eyes are closed. He tries to register his bodily sensations, he does. But it just reminds him of how – uncomfortable he felt, often, curling up in a cupboard under the stairs, in a tent on prickly grass-dirt. When you have ignored your body for this long, it is not easy to train your mind to un-ignore it. Malfoy seems to fare either much better or much worse – he falls asleep. Harry can tell – Malfoy’s lips go from being pursed, at one point, to falling open. He’s not sure if anyone else notices, because when Mandatory Therapy ends Malfoy opens his eyes perfectly normally, springs up and strides out of the room, casting a _“_ Ciao, Bonython,” over his shoulder.

The bastard has just – _had a nap,_ and then _fucked off._ Hermione has designed, it seems to Harry, merely a glorified adult daycare.


End file.
